Living the Good Life, Episode 108 (December 22, 2018): Very nice productivity, as the days grow warmer!

WHOO! Nice week! Had a lot of fun and got a lot of stuff done! And while it’s not exactly spring, the weather’s much warmer, all the snow has melted. Man, global warming might be real after all ;o Though I shouldn’t speak too soon, we’ll probably get another cold snap in January and February. Anyways, the lowdown…

WATCHAN:

Uchuu Senkan Tiramisu ep. 12: Haha! So the dictator dude of Metus has deciphered the monolith and is using its knowledge to build a super piloting system…in his basement. And the whole reason he’s doing it is to destroy Earth because…his ex-wife is taking him to family court! XD He puts the piloting system (that looks like a gourd) into a huge scary mecha that resembles things like the Big Zam from Gundam or the death fortress from Dragonar, and sets off the destroy the family court building (which, given his huge mech, will also destroy the whole planet). Isuzu and Subaru join up to stop him, but even their combined efforts can’t scratch the huge mech. Their father seems to come up with a plan, but sends over a folder full of sexy pictures instead of a schematic detailing the super-mech’s vulnerabilities! It looks like the Earth is doomed, but Subaru has one last trick up his sleeves. Will it work? We’ll have to wait for the next episode to find out, I suppose ;p

Gridman Ep. 12: Last episode! Quite a finale, I’d say. Akane turns into a really scary, freaky Kaiju, but Anti, as Grid Knight, manages to defeat it and get through to Akane, who was sealed up inside of it. However, just as he brings her out of the kaiju’s innards, Alexis stabs him through the chest and absorbs Akane, becoming a kaiju himself as the last boss (so to speak)! But all’s not lost yet, as Hibiki and his weapons get new transforming mechanisms and use them to “access flash” into a new form, and it’s revealed Anti has one as well, which he uses just before he dies.

So with all of them together, they turn into Gridman…but wow, it’s the Gridman from the ORIGINAL live action series!!! I never watched it, but I have been listening to the theme song for a while on Listenonrepeat, and it’s the same Gridman from the original 90s OP, and they even brought back the theme song! How nostalgic! But despite his power, he can’t defeat Alexis, who just regenerates after every attack. This is actually some insight into the villain’s nature–despite his immortality, or rather because of it, Alexis doesn’t really feel any meaningful emotions, so he thrives off the negative emotions of people like Akane.

With his regeneration power, it seems like he’s beaten Gridman, but old-school Gridman reveals another power–a “fixer beam” that can repair things (i.e it’s a healing ability rather than a destructive one). When he uses it on Alexis, it’s like he’s curing Akane’s sickness, thus banishing Alexis and getting Akane to finally accept herself instead of being so self-loathing she had to create an artificial city in the “digital world” for her own psyche. So with Alexis gone, the entire digital world city repairs itself, but it seems like Akane has to leave–the scene cuts to her sitting with Rikka saying her goodbyes, and Rikka gives her a purse as a farewell present. Then Gridman and his agent companions say goodbye to Utsumi and Rikka as well, and return to the “hyper world.” The credits roll, we see Anti woken up (he was sleeping on a bench) by that sound kaiju girl from the earlier episode, and then…it’s interesting. The last bit of the series is live action, as we see a girl waking up in her bed with Rikka’s little purse thing nearby.

I think I sorta understand things now…in the original Gridman, the live-action series involved kids from the real world working with Gridman to fight monsters attacking a digital world that lived inside their computers (sort of like Reboot, if anyone remembers that). So the whole idea behind SSSS gridman is the same–Alexis put a lonely highschool girl in the real world into a coma so he could make use of her emotions in the digital world, so Gridman was sent to stop him, but got messed up and had to work with residents of the digital world (Yuta, Rikka, and Utsumi) to regain his powers.

Pretty cool, pretty cool. SSSS Gridman probably wasn’t the best anime I’ve ever seen in my life–pretty formulaic, as you might expect from a kid’s show–but what it needs to do, it does well. I never really watched the original Gridman, but if I did, man, this last episode would have been a nostalgia bomb. So I can respect that, definitely! Pretty cool, pretty cool 😀

Vento Aureo ep. 12:

Oh, this is cool. So Abbachio, Giorno, and Fugo get to Pompeii and almost reach the dog mosaic in which the “key” was supposed to be hidden, but they encounter a strange mirror–which turns out to be a portal to a mirror world overseen by an enemy stand! Fugo gets sucked in and attacked by the stand user, as he’s powerless in the mirrorverse. We get some explanation of his backstory–he’s really, really smart, having been admitted to university at the age of 13, but his parents put a lot of pressure on him, leading him to have anger problems. Now, in university, this really creepy pedo professor tried to rape him, so he (understandably) lost control and beat the shit out of the guy. Ooof…man, a scumbag like that is pretty on-the-nose given the news nowadays, though in this case, the sicko was a secular professor rather than a priest. His parents manage to keep him from getting sent to jail for assault, but they disown him, so he wanders Italy as a waif until he happens upon Bucciarati and joins his gang.

Anyways, as we get back to the battle, Fugo’s stand is trapped outside the mirror, so the evil stand user can interrogate him inside the mirror…or so he thinks. Fugo comes up with a really sneaky plan! In the real world, his Stand starts punching things, which causes them to blow up in the mirror world. He kills a couple of nearby crows too, which also appear in the mirror world, and this reveals a terrifying power–Fugo’s stand contains a very contagious virus that can make any living thing explode and dissolve within seconds! It’s very dangerous, because it harms both allies and enemies, but fortunately the virus dies in a short time in contact with sunlight. So when the crows in the real world catch the virus (Giorno and Abbachio run away to avoid being infected), some crows in the mirror world catch it too, which hopefully infect the evil stand guy. The funniest thing is that Fugo’s really scary looking stand has its own personality and is REALLY concerned about being clean–it drools involuntarily, and tries to clean itself up right in the middle of an intense battle XD

But it also seems like Fugo can’t control his stand properly in the mirror world, and the virus can’t follow him in there–the dead crows are just reflections of what happened in the real world. So the villain seems poised to launch the final blow…another cliffhanger! D:

I also caught “They Shall Not Grow Old,” a WWI documentary made by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings guy). It was very good! At first it was black and white, so I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about, but then, once they started describing the actual outbreak of the war, the images on screen shifted to color, and then I could see why everyone liked this documentary so much. And it was really very good. Now, the narration was mainly snippets of interviews of WWI veterans describing their daily life in the British army, so there wasn’t a lot of dialogue talking about the reasons for the war, the course of particular battles, campaign strategy, and so on. However, the documentary does an *excellent* job of portraying that sort of daily life, both the humorous parts (like soldiers having to work out how to go to the bathroom in the trenches) to the horrible parts, like the spread of rats and disease, and of course the awful violence of the war itself. There are colored stills of dismembered corpses of men and horses, and it’s really stomach turning–definitely drives home how awful war is. So yeah, a VERY excellent watch! 😀

Star did manage to get episode 32 out for me! I’ve been working on that, I should have it polished and ready to go pretty soon 😀

PLAYAN:

Nothin much, busy with writing and timing ;o

READAN:

Related to my secret project, see below ;D

WRITAN:

Pretty productive! Got a decent bit of work done on my secret project. Again, still can’t say much about it, but let’s just say I got a few thousand words down, and it’s taking shape pretty well 😀 Hope next week goes well too!